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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 4487133" data-attributes="member: 710">My grandfather ate lunch with us yesterday. My grandmother is visiting my grand aunt, and everyone else of his children was apparently on vacation, so it was our (read: my sisters) task to make lunch. (My parents are still with the wife of my deceased uncle). I don't know how we got to the topic, but he shared some childhood memories from the war time. He wasn't old enough to have to serve, but he still remembered the bombers flying over our region (and some rarer machine-gun-blazing ground attack runs), the Prisoners of War serving in the winter and the Nazi ideology. It really still causes goosebumps to hear such stories. The dangers they were in, the violence they even witnessed. He told a story about one prisoner that was whipped by a Nazi and fought back, later to be hanged... He also told about how they gave the prisoners food they had to spare (which wasn't the case that often later in the war, and was risky, of course - though children were not in that much danger). And they "repayed" them with little wood carvings. Two of his brothers (twins) served in the army (even as officers) - one of them died at the Russian front, and another was imprisoned and didn't get free until 1950...Though there were also some fun stories - like about one Nazi-Loyalist that they had greeted in the East-Frisian Tradition ("Moin", Lower-German for "Good Day"), and he insisted on being greeted with "Heil Hitler" - and by insisting I mean he stepped down from his bike and hit the young boys that greeted him this "unpatriotic". Some time later, they pushed that man over into a water-filled trench. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> And it also puts my grandfather in an interesting light. He sometimes has.. questionable assumptions, like the idea that you can't "trust" immigrants, or speak ill of neighboring countries. But he also remembers how cruel the Prisoner Camps were, and he was quite empathic. But he also remembers how the Poles acted during the occupation after the war (they were particularly embittered, similar to the Russians - they were the first to be attacked and the longest to suffer), threatening even his family (mother and siblings).He is more complex that we (my family and me) sometimes take credit for. My grandmother and he don't get along very well, and he can be quite choleric (remember the aforementioned immigrants? Catholics are also on that list). But he also likes to keep in contact with all of his family, and even likes to help out (even if, due to his choleric attitude, we don't always like him to :/ <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> )Just as today, the war isn't over just because one side admits defeat...All in all, it was very interesting. I nearly forgot that - while my parents and my grand-parents are relatively young - that they were still old enough to remember the war. Of course, my other grandfather is older, and he actually served in it (and was also taken prisoner.)</blockquote>

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